Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of emotional abuse and sexual harassment. 

Skylar Stone is one of the novel’s protagonists and first-person narrators. The chapters titled with her name are written from her first-person point of view. In the narrative present, 26-year-old Skylar is a famous country music star from Nashville, Tennessee. For the past several years, she has been living in Los Angeles to further her career. Her father is her manager and has dictated the course of her life (as well as her vocational trajectory) for as long as Skylar can remember. Skylar relies on him, but he has an overbearing personality and has been emotionally abusive to Skylar. Because of their working relationship, Skylar has never figured out how to escape this fraught dynamic. These facets of her family and work life detract from her self-regard and influence her distressed state of mind at the novel’s beginning.

Shortly before she leaves LA, Skylar discovers that she “only own[s] a small percentage of all the songs [she’s] produced and all the contracts [she’s] fulfilled” (201). Despite all of “the hours [she’s] put in” and the money she’s invested” (201), she barely has a

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